This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

With just five films to the quiet Texan’s directing credit in nearly 40 years, including his award-winning new The Tree of Life, his entire oeuvre can be handily covered in a single retrospective, which is exactly what TIFF Bell Lightbox promises with New Worlds: The Films of Terrence Malick, a series running June 4 to 17.

What’s hard is getting a handle on these five majestic works, and inside the mind of the man who made them. They’re populated by such diverse characters as spree killers (Badlands), romantic farmers (Days of Heaven), wistful soldiers (The Thin Red Line), questing pioneers (The New World) and questioning family members (The Tree of Life).

Surface analysis could depict Malick as a dilettante, moving from one distinct topic to another at a pace and public profile markedly slower and lower than that of his contemporaries. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, to name three, all started filmmaking about the same time as Malick, but they’ve since made dozens of movies and have become household names.

It would be inconceivable to think of Scorsese, Coppola or Spielberg shunning Cannes Film Festival laurels on account of “shyness,” to use the bizarre explanation offered by Malick’s producers when he failed to personally accept the Palme d’Or last month for The Tree of Life.

Article Continued Below

But Malick’s avoidance of the limelight is entirely keeping with the larger themes of his movies, in which contemplation of the natural world and the divine presence that created it has increasingly assumed greater import than the petty affairs of men.

This belief, which perhaps comes naturally to a Rhodes scholar who studied philosophy at Harvard, finds ultimate expression in The Tree of Life. Malick’s latest opens in Toronto June 10, ahead of its engagement at the Lightbox, and provides interludes in which the creation of the entire universe is gloriously visualized.

“The message of each of his movies is that you are not the centre of the universe, and as soon as you realize that, the happier you will be,” says Matt Zoller Seitz, a New York film critic and Malick authority.

“His movies are funny in a chilling way, because they always contrast the importance people think their lives have and the importance they actually have.”

Seitz created the film blog The House Next Door out of his love of Malick; more recently, he made a series of video essays on the director’s films for the Museum of the Moving Image, which are available online under the series title All Things Shining.

The Texas-reared Seitz takes issue with the standard media line that Malick is a reclusive auteur, one whose head is perpetually in the clouds. The air of mystery surrounding the 67-year-old Malick owes much to his reluctance to talk to the press; interviews with him are rarer than pieces of the True Cross.

But that doesn’t necessary make him a weird loner, Seitz asserts.

“A recluse is a guy like Howard Hughes, somebody who is a hermit who lives in his own little cave of the mind. Terrence Malick, if you live in Austin, is out there shopping for groceries or books, or walking around his neighbourhood with binoculars.

“He’s happy to talk to people, but just not to reporters, and this apparently makes him a recluse. As for the ‘glacial pace’ thing, there’s this perception that anybody who works this slowly just has to be a pretentious ditherer. I have to wonder: Do any of these people understand how the film industry works? If you’re a director who works with a large budget, as most of these films are, it takes years to make a movie.”

During the 20-year period between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, where it was often assumed that Malick had simply given up filmmaking, he was instead trying in vain to proceed with projects like a Che biopic, which he later turned over to Steven Soderbergh, one of his many admirers. Malick also unsuccessfully tried to adapt The Moviegoer, a prize-winning 1961 novel, set in New Orleans, about an alienated stockbroker.

“All of this says to me that maybe this is a case of a guy who is a little too outside the mainstream to get funded regularly,” Seitz says.

“And also that he has bad luck.”

Despite lacking a huge body of work, Malick has been a powerful influence on many other filmmakers. Seitz identifies the Malick effect in such films as Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Inception, the Quentin Tarantino-written True Romance and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.

Malick also has an admirer in Thom Andersen, the Los Angeles filmmaker and scholar who is bringing his ruminative doc Los Angeles Plays Itself to TIFF next week.

What most impresses Andersen about Malick is his ability to locate a film within a distinct time and place, without resorting to the usual cinematic conventions.

“I think there’s been a bit of a change in recent years, where filmmakers, more than they used to, have come to appreciate the significance of place, or the sense of place, as you see in a movie like The Tree of Life,” Andersen says.

“It’s a movie where you are meant to see the location. There isn’t this distinction between background and foreground in the way it’s filmed. I admire what Malick is doing. He’s making the best possible use of the Hollywood machine to create his work.”

Seitz adds that Malick is doing much more than that. He’s encouraging people to take in the whole of the cosmos around them, something that’s often lacking in our self-centred lives.

“I don’t believe in a God, a guy with a beard in the sky,” Seitz says, “but when I go to Malick’s films, I often feel the way I’m supposed to be feeling in church.”

Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm

The Films of Terrence Malick

Badlands (1973): Malick’s critically acclaimed debut, a mood study of mindless violence and lost innocence, was based on the true story of 1950s American spree killer Charles Starkweather and his teen girlfriend. Starring a pre-fame Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, it screens at TIFF June 4, 7 and 14.

Days of Heaven (1978): This gorgeously photographed pastoral work, often compared to the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, is set in 1916 in Malick’s native Texas. Richard Gere and Brooke Adams play deceptive lovers, on the run from incident and life, who seek advantage in the infatuation of a rich wheat farmer (Sam Shepard). Screens at TIFF June 4, 11 and 15.

The Thin Red Line (1998): Breaking a 20-year silence, Malick returned to the screen with this World War II-era saga, based on James Jones’ classic war novel. Starring Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Adrien Brody, John Cusack and George Clooney, it’s the battle of Guadalcanal as both war lament and nature reverie. Screens at TIFF June 5, 8 and 13.

The New World (2005): Malick’s telling of the primal saga of British explorer Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and his native American lover Pocahontas (newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher). Worlds old and new stand in awe of nature and fear of man’s infinite capacity to corrupt it. Screens at TIFF June 5 and 12.

The Tree of Life (2011): An epic creation poem starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain, set in 1950s Texas but also in the universe of the past and future, it’s this year’s winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It begins a regular run June 17 at TIFF, a week after its general release elsewhere.

PH

Delivered dailyThe Morning Headlines Newsletter

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com